


the grammar of faith

by endquestionmark



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 05:28:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9864986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: Sometimes Minkowski thinks that if she ever found herself without something to do, she would come apart at the joints. Explosive decompression, metaphorical or otherwise, doesn’t seem like a great way to go.It doesn’t matter what she wants. It matters what she does.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this nightmare was 595–644 because there was just that much timeline calculation involved. For reference, this begins on day 595 of the Hephaestus Mission after Ep. 15 ("What's Up, Doc") and before Ep. 16 ("Painfully Ever After") and ends on day 894 after Ep. 31 ("Sécurité"). As such it contains spoilers for basically everything in between. This is supposedly a story about mechanisms of care, which has since sprawled vaguely outwards. Blame and credit to the usual suspects, namely [Mari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung) and [Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit); poor life choices, as usual, all my own.

Eiffel and Hera have been playing chess for six hours.

Minkowski knows that because she, like Eiffel, can’t sleep; she, unlike Eiffel, uses that time to check systems that might have been affected by Hera’s abrupt reversion to the autopilot equivalent of Sensus BASIC. Every time she passes by the communications room, Eiffel is losing.

If she had more room in her head, Minkowski would try and keep track of his strategy, or at least his score. So far her best guess is approximately fourteen to one, not counting however many he played before their little chat with Hilbert, and as long as Eiffel hasn’t lost any games lasting under five minutes. That doesn’t seem like a very safe assumption. Something else that doesn’t seem like a safe assumption is that they will be able to keep the Hephaestus in the sky for longer than a week under manual control. Minkowski knows her ship, top to bottom, and she knows just how much bandwidth goes into keeping it operational, and she knows that she and Eiffel don’t have a tenth of what they need.

The lights are dimmed. They run on an automatic cycle, switched permanently on the hallways and maintenance shafts but motion-activated everywhere except for the bridge. It might be the one system on the station that will remain nominal no matter what else fails, Minkowski thinks, so whatever comes next at least they should be able to see it coming. She plants her foot against the wall and pushes off, heading towards the bridge. Pull, kick; handhold, foothold. The Hephaestus is her ship, and Minkowski will keep it flying if she has to hold it together with duct tape and obstinacy. She’ll take care of her crew, and get them home, if it’s the last thing she ever does.

Her crew might be slightly smaller, now, but that makes no difference. A crew of four, a crew of two: a crew of one, not counting herself. Minkowski understands the responsibility she assumed with the command. She wants to feel yellow sunlight again, wants to drink real coffee and be able to brush her teeth with something other than semi-liquid calcium carbonate slurry, but she left everything behind for a shot at the stars. She made her choices. If Minkowski landed on Earth tomorrow, she knows it would feel just as alien as her first few days in orbit. She would be just as much a stranger to her friends, her family, as she would if she never came back at all.

If it comes down to it, if she has to choose, Minkowski isn’t crew.

She has work to do. She has systems to check. After that, she has six hours before reveille, and if Minkowski keeps her log short then she can maybe wring five hours of rack time out of that.

Minkowski has too much to do.

She has a ship to run. She has a crew to take care of. She doesn’t have time to keep score, or hold grudges, or play games.

Sometimes Minkowski thinks that if she ever found herself without something to do, she would come apart at the joints. Explosive decompression, metaphorical or otherwise, doesn’t seem like a great way to go.

It doesn’t matter what she wants. It matters what she does.

The Hephaestus feels more and more like a no-win scenario every day. Minkowski can map her worries, the thoughts that keep her up at night and the ones that wake her up in the morning, onto it like a scan of her brain activity. They could lose an engine and their orbit could decay at a rate too high to reverse; the station could sustain massive structural damage as a result of accumulated stress and insufficient maintenance; they could encounter some kind of deep space anomaly that exposes them to unforeseen conditions that the station just isn’t built to withstand.

The bridge is always lit for a crew of five, standard operating procedure on in-system missions, but deep space stations are always manned by a skeleton crew. Just enough to keep the ship operational, but not enough to result in significant collateral if the mission fails. Minkowski does her best with what she has, but she just can’t take up enough space, can’t be everywhere at once. Usually she has Hera for that. Alone, the bridge is too empty and too bright. It presses at Minkowski’s temples and sets light flaring in the space behind her eyes, sets her thoughts jangling like distorted alarms.

Systems check: Life support remains nominal, although there are some issues with air recirculation which Minkowski is beginning to realize must have been there all along. Hera must have been compensating on an active basis. She and Eiffel will just have to hope nothing goes critical when neither of them can get to a console.

Systems check: Pressure is as stable as it ever gets on a station the size of the Hephaestus, which is to say not very, but there’s enough equalization between decks that it shouldn’t make much difference.

Systems check: Navigation is nominal. Not that they’re going anywhere, but it’s protocol; check systems in order of priority.

Systems check: Fuel also appears nominal. Minkowski stares at the readout for one minute, and then two, and then she presses the heels of her hands into her eyes for a steady count down from ten.

At seven, she begins to wonder if she counted five twice.

She starts again.

At four, she exhales, and makes it last the rest of the count.

Minkowski opens her eyes. The only system that runs a regular risk of failure isn’t one she can designate to the ship’s processors or set on a timer or even run manually, because it’s her; it’s her and Eiffel. As much as Minkowski knows about the Hephaestus, there are systems that she still doesn’t understand. She lacks the processing power, the sense of scale, to track the hundred thousand possible contingency plans that a mother program would be able to prepare and implement. She lacks the total awareness of every irregularity the station encounters, every potential hazard. And of course she has to sleep — uninterrupted rest, preferably for more than three hours at a time, while the station somehow holds itself together with duct tape and luck and the proportional equivalent of a graphing calculator program.

Minkowski reviews error reports whenever she has the chance, checks the timestamps and the frequency of specific system failures.

The longest the Hephaestus has ever gone without a breakdown of some kind is five hours.

She checks the systems again. Electrical, nominal; temperature, more or less nominal; engineering, nominal.

If she heads to her quarters now, Minkowski’s best guess is that she might get a good four and a half hours of sleep before something requires her attention. She won’t be far from the bridge. She should rest while she can.

She checks the systems again: all nominal.

In her quarters, she dims the lights manually, and stares unseeing into the close darkness, listens to the faint empty hum of systems running on automatic.

Everything is broken, and everything is wrong, and Minkowski can’t fix it, but she’ll be damned before she lets it get any worse.

At some point, she must fall asleep, because when the alarm goes off four hours later Minkowski feels worse than she would if she hadn’t slept at all.

 

* * *

 

She keeps it under control for a while. That’s her job, as commanding officer, and Minkowski is proud of how well she does it. Eiffel doesn’t notice, because he has other things to do, like play endless games of chess and contemplate his newfound status as an experimental subject and project enough willful obliviousness for a crew of eight.

No, that’s mean. Minkowski is being mean. The alarms are infrequent enough that, so far, she’s been able to resolve their causes before they set off a shipwide klaxon. There isn’t really a reason for Eiffel to know, if she keeps it well in hand. He has enough to deal with on his own.

What stings most is — well, a lot of things. Minkowski doesn’t really have time to lay out a list of her grievances with Command, and more immediately with Hilbert, unless she wants to spend three days sitting in a corner and complaining at dead space. What really stings is how thorough his betrayal was, how complete — from her first day on board, Hilbert must have known that sooner or later a contingency would arise. Every moment of every day, he must have looked at her and drawn a mental chalk outline around her, a red X over her face. Every time he addressed her, he must have been reading her obituary in his head. What would it have been? Station-wide system failure, maybe, or an unforeseen stellar event. Probably something that Canaveral could pin on her, either way: negligence, exhaustion, poor judgement. Minkowski remembers the endless obituaries, the failure reports and news stories she used to read over her husband’s shoulder.

She wonders what they would have told him. All the same things they tell every bereaved partner, every grieving family, probably; it didn’t hurt, it was quick. All the same old lies.

When the next alarm comes, Minkowski looks at the time. Three hours. It could be worse. She still has time to sleep and do basic maintenance. Unfortunately, she also has time to think. Hilbert’s betrayal eats at her, colors every one of her memories and every thought she has. She wonders when he got to Hera, when he got to Eiffel. She wonders if he was planning to get to her next, and how he would have done it. He could have undermined her authority, staged an emergency and let it spiral out of control. He could have engineered a technical malfunction in a life support system. He could have—

 _What? Hurt a member of your crew and let you twist on the hook?_ Minkowski thinks. _Yeah_.

She hasn’t let herself think about that too much yet, partly because Eiffel is gutted enough for both of them and partly because it won’t help anybody. Part of her — and Minkowski doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t have to — has already jumped from denial to acceptance, and from there to management. She and Eiffel just don’t have the technical expertise to reconstruct personality hardware, even if they had the equipment or the time to spare.

She hasn’t told Eiffel. It seems kinder to promise that they’ll try, even if she already knows what the result will be, to put off that heartbreak for another day. It does come as a surprise to Minkowski that he knows how to play chess, let alone enjoys it enough to play game after losing game for hours on end.

On the other hand, it probably isn’t about the chess.

It would be easier if Minkowski could talk to literally anybody. Command is out for obvious reasons, mostly to do with the fact that they apparently ordered her death, and Minkowski would rather chew glass than get Hilbert on the line for a friendly chat. _Remember, you made me do this_ — the worst thing he could possibly have said. Minkowski knows he was talking to Eiffel, but she should have had a better idea. She should have moved faster, had a backup plan, found some way to keep anybody from getting hurt. She should have known that he would stop at nothing.

There it is, under everything else: the hurt, real and deep, but worse than that is the distrust in herself. Minkowski keeps trying to find a start point, the beginning of where she went wrong, where she should have asked more questions and demanded more answers and guessed that she was being kept deliberately in the dark. The problem is that it could be any time.

She knows better than to let Hilbert get to her with his hobbyist psyops, or she should. He isn’t precisely wrong, though. It had taken her, what, fifteen minutes to sign on the dotted line? Less. Maybe ten minutes, to abandon her real, reasonable life for a chance at something more. For her entire life, Minkowski has defined herself in opposition to what people have told her she can’t do, what she isn’t good enough for, what she’ll never manage to pull off, working twice as hard for a shot at half as much. Maybe she doesn’t know how to define herself any other way, too focused on the details to notice the big picture.

She should have guessed. She shouldn’t have let anybody hurt her crew. In that sense, Minkowski supposes that he’s right. She is a waste.

At least she knows that Hilbert was wrong about one thing. Minkowski doesn’t lack ambition, and she doesn’t lack focus, and right now both are trained on the narrow possibility of survival. Right now she doesn’t have to take orders from anybody but herself. Screw Canaveral, and screw their marching orders and their chain of command.

Although: Where does that leave her? Useless commander of a useless station, dead in the sky.

When the next alarm comes, Minkowski swings into action, and tries not to think too much about what a relief it is to go through the motions, reset the temperature monitoring system and run diagnostics on life support, just in case, instead of sitting with her thoughts and waiting to see if she can handle the next emergency.

She looks at the time. Two hours and forty-six minutes.

Sooner or later, fatigue will catch up to her; sooner or later, something will break that she can’t fix. Maybe it already has. Sooner or later she’ll have to admit that she can’t keep it under control forever.

Minkowski hopes that it’s later. She can’t afford to fail. She doesn’t have time to be anything but good enough. _Just this once,_ she thinks, _if this is the only time I’m not a waste, if this is the only shot I get. Just this once._

 

* * *

 

When the interval between alarms hits two hours, Minkowski makes a strategic concession and wakes Eiffel up. He looks only slightly better than she feels.

“Wait,” he says. “That was you?”

Minkowski just looks at him, too tired to ask what he means without snapping at him; she’s riding on the very edge of exhaustion. In another few hours, she’ll tip over into delirium, and if she makes it through that then she’ll get a few hours of renewed energy before she crashes for good. Fortunately, he seems to know what she means.

“The systems failures.” Eiffel tips his head at the speaker grating, blessedly silent for the moment. “You’ve been handling them manually?”

She shrugs. “Not like we’ve got a lot of other options.”

“Well, yeah,” he says. “But still. It’s been—” Minkowski watches as he looks vaguely upwards, apparently seeking the answer somewhere in the ceiling. “—A lot?”

She takes mercy on him. “Yes,” she says. “Let’s go with that.” She shrugs. “So far so good.”

“Uh, not really. With all due respect, Commander, you look like refried crap,” Eiffel says. “Why didn’t you tell me?“

“I had it under control,” Minkowski says, a little defensive. He just looks at her. “What?“

“Yeah, but you don’t—” Eiffel starts, and apparently decides better of it. He grins. “That’s why I’m here, right? To work triple overtime doing a job that a computer could do better.”

“Eiffel,” Minkowski says.

“I’m kidding!” He frowns. “Well, sort of. That’s not my point. All I’m saying is that you should have asked, if only because your dark circles are getting kind of scary. You could probably give Lon Chaney a pretty good run for his money right now.”

Minkowski sighs. “Thanks,” she said. “And look, it wasn’t personal. It’s just—” She pauses.

“Just what?” Eiffel prompts, after a beat.

“You’ve had a lot to deal with in the last few days,” she says finally, a little awkward. “I thought you might want a little space.”

He makes a ridiculous face. “Who, me? Nah, this happens all the time. A little murder, a little human experimentation, must be a Tuesday.” After a minute, he looks away. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t know? It’s not like I can do anything about it.” Eiffel shrugs. “Put me to work. I’d rather do something useful. Plus this way I have an excuse to break my losing streak. One less thing for Hera to be superior about when she’s back.”

Minkowski tries not to let her response to that show, but is pretty sure she fails. “Yeah,” she says, and knows that it sounds awful, like she’s humoring him. She is. “Well, it’s definitely a _good_ excuse.”

“Sure,” Eiffel says. He looks like he knows what she isn’t saying, and wants to talk about anything else. “So. What’s the SparkNotes version? Which system is going most wrong, most of the time?”

“Ah,” Minkowski says. “Well. All of them.”

Eiffel just stares at her for a minute. “Okay,” he says finally. “Remind me why you didn’t want to tell me about this?”

Because she had it under control, Minkowski thinks. Because she wanted to limit the possibility of failure to variables she could manage, to losses she could handle; because she didn’t want to lose any more of her crew to a disaster that never should have happened in the first place.

“Like I said,” she says instead. “It was fine.” Eiffel doesn’t bother to hide how dubious he is about that. Before he can say anything else that they’ll both regret, Minkowski nods along the corridor, towards the bridge. “You coming?”

Eiffel grins. “Lead the way.”

The bridge isn’t much less empty with two, but every little counts. Between alarms — down to one hour thirty, and then fifteen — they work in silence to set up workarounds, contingency plans, stopgap measures that might save them a few vital minutes later.

“You should get some sleep,” Eiffel says, apropos of nothing.

“What? No,” Minkowski says, almost before she processes his words. “I’m fine.”

“You look like a zombie.” He doesn’t even have the decency to look apologetic. “And not the cool parasitic mutant type. The _we don’t know how to do CGI yet so we’re just going to plaster you with eyeshadow and mud_ kind.”

Minkowski blinks. “So the classic kind,” she says.

“It wasn’t meant to be a compliment,” Eiffel says. Hestares at her until she sighs and throws up her hands.

“Okay!” Minkowski casts about the room for a tether so that she won’t go flying if navigation fails again while she’s out. “But promise—”

“It’ll be fine,” Eiffel interjects.

“— _Promise_ me you’ll wake me up the second anything seems out of the ordinary. Or if you can’t handle something,” she adds, after a moment’s thought. “Or if you have any questions. Or—”

“Commander!” Eiffel says. “I’ll be _fine_. Go to sleep.”

“Okay,” Minkowski says dubiously, wrapping the strap around her ankle. “But seriously. Wake me up.”

“I will, I will,” Eiffel says, and God knows why, but that must reassure her, because Minkowski only has time to think _you’d better_ before she goes out like a light.

When she wakes up, she actually feels reasonably well-rested.

“How long was I asleep?” she asks, and Eiffel looks at the clock.

“Five hours,” he says. “Sure you don’t want to hit snooze a few times?”

Minkowski blinks. “Wait. Did I sleep through an alarm?”

Eiffel holds up one hand. “Hold on, I can _see_ you getting stressed about it. Yeah, but obviously it was fine! I handled it.”

“Wait,” Minkowski says, narrowing her eyes. “Five hours? Did I sleep through more than one alarm?”

He winces. “Maybe.” She narrows her eyes further. “Okay, yes! You slept through three alarms. But it was fine! And I took care of it! So you can definitely get another few hours of sleep, round it out to an even eight, and then we can switch off. Or I can just stay awake. I mean, not that I’ve been sleeping much anyway, but my point is—”

A klaxon cuts him off. Minkowski pushes off the wall, and only remembers the tether around her ankle when she jerks to an abrupt halt two feet later. Eiffel has the common sense to pretend he hasn’t seen anything and focus on crisis management, and by the time the alarm is silent again Minkowski has regained her mobility, even if her dignity is a lost cause. “You were saying?”

“My point is that it was under control until you woke up,” Eiffel says. “So obviously the responsible thing to do would be for you to go back to sleep?”

“Is that a suggestion or a question?” Minkowski can’t help but ask.

“Whichever means you won’t take disciplinary action,” Eiffel admits.

“Right,” she says. “I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear it.”

“Thanks,” he whispers.

“And I’m not going back to sleep,” Minkowski adds, because she’s nothing if not driven by stubbornness and spite.

“Yep.”

“And you’re going to give me a full sitrep on everything I missed.”

“Yes sir,” Eiffel says, and gives her the most efficient and straightforward briefing he’s ever managed.

They still don’t talk. Minkowski has too many variables to keep in mind and too much to worry about, and unflattering though it might be she still finds herself clinging to the chain of command as a last vestige of sense. It keeps her sharp and keeps Eiffel safe. At the very edge of the universe, the end of the world, and Minkowski is still standing on protocol: Eiffel would probably find it funny, if it wasn’t so deadly serious. He would probably make fun of her for it. He would definitely laugh.

She can’t remember the last time she heard Eiffel laugh. Maybe it was after he nearly drowned, which would explain why it doesn’t happen so often these days. At least the bridge is less empty with two; at least the silence is companionable, now.

The next alarm comes forty minutes after that.

Eiffel looks at her.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’ve been coming more and more frequently. No idea why. Slightly desynchronized cycles, if I had to guess, but I have less than no idea what to do about that. You?”

Minkowski shakes her head. “We’ll handle it.”

Eiffel nods. He trusts her, even as she careens from crisis to crisis, already barely able to keep up with the bare minimum of emergency management. For that reason alone, she needs to get them through this. She can’t let him down.

She needs to be good enough.

 

* * *

 

After that, Minkowski only manages to sneak a few catnaps between alarms; better than nothing at all, but not by much. She takes the next shift, while Eiffel sleeps. He has an uncanny ability to pass out more or less anywhere, regardless of whether or not he’s likely to go through the metaphorical windscreen if they come to a sudden stop, and more than once she has to nudge an errant limb out of the way while she works. At least he doesn’t wake up. Minkowski can’t think of anything more awkward at the moment than explaining to Eiffel why she has to keep rearranging his elbows like some kind of exercise in zero-gravity origami.

By the time he mumbles himself awake, Minkowski has gone through about eight successive stages of escalating irritation and punch-drunkenness and landed squarely amid delirium. “Are you humming?” Eiffel asks. He sounds wary.

“Definitely not,” Minkowski says, humming to herself.

He nods. “I see.” He manages to stay quiet for almost a full minute, then bursts out: “Actually I don’t see. Are you sure you aren’t humming? Cough twice if you’re really Minkowski. Keep humming if you’re secretly your evil twin.”

“I can’t be myself and my evil twin at the same time,” Minkowski feels compelled to point out.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Eiffel says darkly.

She smiles at that. “Thanks,” she says, voice cheery.

“Okay,” Eiffel says slowly. “So you aren’t humming, but you didn’t cough either. I have to admit I’m at a loss.” He looks down. “Also, why are my legs wrapped around the maintenance panel like pipe cleaners?”

“You kept running into things,” Minkowski says. He blinks at her. “It was that or shoving you under the console.”

Eiffel nods, head tilted sideways. “I... see,” he says. “Actually—” He tilts his head the other way. “—no, I take it back, I was right the first time. Yep. Nope. Never mind.”

Minkowski nods serenely. “See?” she says. And adds, apropos of nothing: “You know what I really miss? Sofas.”

“Sofas.” Eiffel finishes untangling his legs from the panel and drifts over to the console next to her. “Not, I don’t know. Real food? Toothpaste? Coffee?” He makes a thinking noise. “You don’t strike me as the sitcom type. Senate committee hearings? Live TV musicals? Definitely ice cream.”

“File folders,” Minkowski says, voice dreamy, and bursts out laughing at Eiffel’s expression. “No, I’m kidding. Well, sort of.”

“Commander,” he says, “you are a deeply strange person.”

“Like you can talk. And no, I miss coffee too.” She sighs. “But keep in mind that I’ve had nearly six hundred days to think about this, and sofas are still top of the list.”

“Not helping,” Eiffel says, but he looks a little less freaked out. “Seriously? Not C-SPAN and Chinese?”

“Eiffel, nobody watches C-SPAN,” she says, and he snorts.

“Okay, fair enough. So why sofas? Fond memories? Somebody special? Or just an unhealthy devotion to interior design?”

Minkowski gives him an unimpressed stare. “Not subtle.”

He doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. “Had to ask.”

“And no,” she says. “It’s just nice to have somewhere to sit at the end of the day that isn’t a desk chair or the floor.” She shrugs. “Every time I visited my parents, it was the first thing I did. You don’t know how much you’ll miss owning more than three pieces of furniture until you don’t.”

Eiffel nods. “Sure.”

Something about the way he says it makes Minkowski want to ask what he means, to see what he’s trying to smooth over with flat agreement and a suspicious lack of teasing. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like the time. “What about you?” she says. “What do you miss?”

“Oh boy.” He leans back and crosses his arms. “Man, it’s a good thing we aren’t short on time. What _don’t_ I miss, more like. Let’s see. Coffee, obviously. Pizza. Also obvious. Beer.” He hesitates. “Honestly? The sky.”

“The sky,” Minkowski says. “You? Really?”

“What can I say? I’m an abstract kind of guy.” Eiffel shrugs. “Yeah. Like you said, you don’t know how much you’ll miss it until you haven’t seen it in months. The more you know.”

“Honestly, I expected something a little more—” She hesitates, but she hasn’t made it this far without just brazening through her least flattering impulses. “Well — to be frank, grossly obscene.”

He snorts. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s on the list. I’m a man of many talents. One of them, and let me finish the sentence before you start laughing, one of the ones I exercise on a less frequent basis is tact.”

Minkowski just stares at him.

“A much less frequent basis!” he says. “Barely ever, except when it really counts. You know what, ignore me. Let’s talk about something else.” The silence lasts just long enough for trepidation to dawn fully. “Wait. So was it on your list?”

“No,” she snaps, and prods aimlessly at the console. “Yes, but I happen to have a pulse, so I don’t think it’s as out of the ordinary as you seem to think.”

“Oh, no,” Eiffel says. “Who, me? No way. I don’t think. Especially not about, wait, who’s thinking? Not me. So it’s fine. Right?”

Minkowski squints at the monitor. “You know, I think I understood about ten percent of that sentence, and it was the part where you said you don’t think.”

“Right,” Eiffel says. He sounds relieved. “So that’s a yes?” He looks instantly horrified. “I mean, ignore me, I didn’t actually mean to say that out loud!”

“Eiffel,” Minkowski says, voice flat, staring into space.

“Yep,” he says, voice tiny.

“Yes,” she hisses.

“Okay,” he says, barely audible, and Minkowski wants to throw something, but they don’t have equipment to waste.

“Okay!” She wheels around. “Yes, that’s a yes. Obviously I miss it, because I have a hindbrain, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but of the many things we lack on this station one of the most glaring is human company, so I don’t know if this is actually possible but if you can manage to shift gears from id to superego just once —  _once_ — every two years or so, just assume that the rest of us perform that supremely frustrating balancing act on a daily basis!” He just stares at her. “What?”

“Wow,” Eiffel says. “I’ve never heard anyone speak in italics before.”

“Of course.” Minkowski turns back to the console.

“No, hey.” He opens his hands and plants them on the console. “Look, we can’t all be a closed book. Ask me anything, how’s that? Question for a question. Hit me.”

Minkowski, much as she hates to admit it, has so many. “Top five,” she says, because it’s safe, at least compared to everything else she could ask. “Things you miss. The sky doesn’t count.”

“Cigarettes,” he says. “Coffee. Still pizza. These are in no particular order, for the record. So that’s two left, right?” Eiffel looks at nothing in particular. “Uh, having girls sit on my face. Also, sunglasses,” he says, “because they’re awesome. Wait.” A look of horror begins to dawn on his face. “Did I just — actually, no. Never mind. Let’s go back to sunglasses. And pizza.”

“That makes your top five?” Minkowski says, because she’s so used to litigating every single stupid thing Eiffel says that apparently it’s a reflex now. “Not the sunglasses. The one before. That makes your list, and not toothpaste?”

He just gives her a look as if she started speaking a different language halfway through the sentence, and Minkowski can’t help it. She bursts out laughing, the kind of full-body borderline hysteria that leaves her doubled up and wiping away tears. “Oh my God,” she says. “No, don’t say it, I know.”

“You’re _amazingly_ straitlaced,” Eiffel says. At least he doesn’t look offended, she thinks. “Toothpaste?”

That sends her off into another gale of laughter. “Don’t say it! I know. God, sorry, I just — toothpaste!”

When she finally manages to clear her vision, Eiffel is looking at her with something approaching fondness in his face. “You are a terrifying person,” he says.

“Toothpaste,” Minkowski gasps. She sniffs. “Jesus. I swear I feel a decade younger.”

“Glad to be of assistance,” Eiffel says.

Minkowski doesn’t stop smiling for ten minutes, and even after the next alarm goes off — just for a second — she can make herself believe that they’ll be all right.

 

* * *

 

The problem with emergencies is that they don’t last. Just before she and Eiffel discover whether exhaustion has an event horizon, but after the damage is done, Hera comes back online — inimitable personality firmly in place — and that, somehow, is even more strange. Not that Hera is back, because Minkowski would make any number of deals with the devil all over again for that, but that suddenly she has so much less to do. Everything is back in place; nothing is the same. Her crew is safe and her station is secure, but all of them are abruptly in more danger than Minkowski knew existed in the universe. She feels as if she’s come home to an empty apartment with nothing out of place, and yet something still feels wrong. Some long-buried instinct, some subconscious impression, makes her want to slam the door and flee.

Of course she can’t do that, so instead Minkowski takes the first rotation and asks Hera to override all Hilbert’s secrecy protocols under her authority as commanding officer. She doesn’t doubt that whatever answers she gets won’t be everything, since apparently Control built her redundancy into their standard contingency plan, but it seems like a good place to start. Notebooks in hand, she returns to the bridge. “Oh, Commander,” Hera says, a touch sheepish, as Minkowski reorients herself to open the hatch. “We should do this somewhere else. Officer Eiffel may have fallen asleep not long after his off-rotation began. In place.”

Minkowski sighs and kicks off. “All right,” she says. “Anywhere that isn’t on fire, off-limits, possibly uninhabitable, or the observations deck?”

She winds up in the communications room, because their lives are rife with the kind of narrative irony describable only by Murphy’s Law. “Hera,” Minkowski says before she starts writing. “It’s good to have you back.”

“Thank you,” Hera says. Her voice crackles a little, a distinct electric interference that sounds different from her usual echoing glitches. “Did you want to prioritize those secrecy protocols by magnitude or complexity?”

Minkowski frowns. “Magnitude?”

“Of repercussions,” Hera says.

“What about based on, well, secrecy?” Minkowski says. “Could we start with what he wants me to know least?”

“Hmm.” Hera falls silent for a moment. “Yes, I think so. I mean, there isn’t a categorization system, but I think I can extrapolate from key length and certification. Give me a moment.”

“While you do that, how’s Officer Eiffel?”

“Still asleep,” Hera says. “He was planning to stay awake, but apparently there _is_ a force greater than his petulance. He fell asleep shortly after you left the room.”

Minkowski blinks. “Great,” she says. “I guess I’ll let him catch you up on the finer points and more colorful detail of what you missed. Is there anything you wanted to know before that, just in general?”

Hera says nothing for a moment. “We should start with secrecy protocols,” she says. “I still have a lot to process in terms of the last—”

“Seventeen days,” Minkowski supplies.

“Yes,” Hera says, voice clipped. “Thank you.”

Minkowski nods. “All right. Whenever you’re ready.”

The list actually takes up three notebooks, even after Minkowski resorts to writing in the margins. Some of the protocols seem obscure to the point of uselessness — it doesn’t seem likely that they’ll encounter any kind of identity-confusion issue, for a start, given that there are only three of them with corporeal manifestations and Minkowski is usually certain of at least her own identity — and some of them she knows will keep her up at night for weeks if not months.

What gets to her is the thoroughness, the degree of foresight built into the contingencies, and in more than a few cases the utter clinicism of the protocols. The notes about cleanup, for example, and the likely debris resulting from an engineered decompression accident. The addenda about fluid dynamics. The footnotes about keeping all communication channels open until there is no question that vital signs have permanently ceased. It sticks in the head and, in some of the scenarios Hera lists, to the walls.

She doesn’t sleep well for a week, and for another after that, wherever she looks Minkowski sees the outcomes-that-could-have-been, the contingencies that weren’t: a crack in the hull, a critical life support failure, a freak accident. She looks at Eiffel and imagines the half of his face turned away from her as a mass of shattered bone and pulped tissue, mushroomed into unbelievable shapes by depressurization and momentum; she looks at the console and imagines it dead and unresponsive; she looks at herself in the mirror and her eyes, for the space of a blink, become clouded and bloody: retinal detachment due to oxygen toxicity. A thousand ways to die, and Minkowski sees all of them, some while she’s awake and all the rest in her sleep.

She prefers the former. At least she can distract herself. When Minkowski dreams, she never realizes it, and then it’s over and she has to contend with the false memory, fully formed and inescapable.

The other problem with emergencies is that they leave a vacuum in their wake, the sort of silence that leaves everybody looking at each other and wondering: Well, what now? And then, worse yet, somebody might actually answer.

Minkowski makes a point of not asking, after Hera cuts life support and nearly gets Eiffel killed. She doesn’t want to know, and she probably isn’t the right person for the job anyway. There doesn’t seem to be any point pressing the matter, not when Eiffel is the one who got caught in the blast radius of whatever Hera is dealing with.

What Minkowski carefully doesn’t think about is how, in Hera’s situation, she would probably have done the same thing.

_Don’t you trust me?_

What she doesn’t wonder is whether, if she asked Eiffel point blank, he would give the same answer.

She knows that he would answer, if she pushed, no matter how embarrassing the truth. Tired as she might have been, Minkowski still remembers that he only hesitated for a second, and looked at her afterwards — _toothpaste?_ — as if he wouldn’t take any of it back.

Minkowski has a feeling like a floater at the corner of her vision, a word at the tip of her tongue, that he would give her precisely the same reply he gave Hera. Without pause, and without asking again, Eiffel would do whatever she asked.

So she doesn’t: ask, that is. Not Hera, not Eiffel, not Hilbert. Minkowski doesn’t need to know why. She just needs to know what answer she’ll get if she ever does. In Eiffel’s case, she has a few more than she wanted to begin with. Minkowski carefully doesn’t think about that either.

It isn’t so bad. Time passes. Nothing gets worse.

They drift.

 

* * *

 

The only reason it ever goes beyond that is because Minkowski lets Eiffel touch her, just once, and so far away from everyone and everything else, once is all it takes. Never mind that it’s because her shoulder is dislocated and, for all her obstinacy, even Minkowski can’t fix that on her own. She should know better. She should find a way. In her defense, she’s unconscious at the time courtesy of a certain mutated horticulture experiment gone rogue, so the first thing Minkowski hears when she comes around is Eiffel muttering furiously about being too stubborn for her own good. Then she straightens up and he goes grey in the face.

“Oh, God,” Eiffel says, when he sees the way her arm is hanging. “Are you sure you don’t want, you know, the _actual doctor_ we have on board to take a look?”

“Eiffel,” Minkowski bites out. She really doesn’t have patience to waste on browbeating him into shoving her shoulder back into its socket. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that this is worse for you than it is for me?” She gestures, kind of uselessly since her arm is still hanging at her side. Her elbow swings forward a few degrees, and awful white spots bloom in her vision. She steadies herself against the wall, white-knuckling a handhold, and when she gets her breath back Minkowski uses all of it to hiss: “Because I guarantee it is not.”

Eiffel winces. “I’m just saying I might not be the best man for the job!” He looks vaguely ashen. “I have the upper body strength of an overcooked noodle and I’m not really great with pain and _oh God_ please stop doing that.”

“What?” Minkowski looks at him innocently. She twitches her fingers. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That!” Eiffel looks like he’s trying to make her stop by sheer force of squeamishness. “Oh my God! Okay, okay, I’ll do it!” She lets her hand fall open, and he sighs with relief. “Doesn’t it hurt when you do that?”

Minkowski grins. “So much,” she says. “So, so much.” Eiffel looks at her as if she’s grown a second head. “What? It got you to do something, didn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t thank me just yet, if I were you.” He gingerly takes hold of her elbow, watching her face. “Are you—”

“If you ask me if I’m sure _one more time_ I swear I’ll shove the words back down your throat myself,” Minkowski says. “Yes, I’m sure, and if you don’t get over yourself and get my shoulder back into its socket in the next thirty seconds — _fuck_ me! Jesus Christ! What the hell?”

“Are you okay, Commander?” Hera says. “That sounded painful.”

“It was!” Minkowski forces herself to uncurl her fingers from the handhold. It takes a moment before she regains sensation. She tests her shoulder, feeling out the extent of the damage. It doesn’t seem like anything she can’t muscle through. “Eiffel?”

He cringes. “Yes? Look, in my defense, you said I shouldn’t ask you and the more time I had to think about it the less decisive I would have been and that’s what you want in this kind of thing, right? Decisiveness? When you’re shoving somebody’s arm back into its socket, I mean, and oh my God if you’re going to hit me please just get it over with but make sure you use your good arm because I don’t think I can do that again.” He runs out of steam and breath. “Why are you smiling? That’s worrying. That’s a worrying smile. Please don’t airlock me either.”

“Thanks,” Minkowski says. The look on his face is so comical that she can’t help but laugh. “Look. You might have the work ethic of a dead sea cucumber and the intestinal fortitude to match, but your self-preservation instinct might just make up for it. And now? Now I can get back to what really matters, and leave you to—” She squints at the monitor. “—Wait. What were you actually doing before this?”

“What? Before I had to haul your unconscious as...pect back here and play a nice round of the arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone?”

Minkowski glares. “Nice catch.”

“Thanks,” Eiffel says. “I’ve actually had literal nightmares about that. And I was doing, uh. Work? Important work. Stress-testing the autopilot’s single-function reflexes. Just to make sure nothing was off after all the, well, you know. All the everything.”

“Pong,” Minkowski says, voice flat. “You were using my multi-million dollar station processor to—” She takes a closer look and changes direction. “—Well, to lose at Pong. How long did that game even last?”

Eiffel winces. “Twenty seconds? Look, it’s an improvement. Call it two for one! I’m improving my hand-eye coordination at the same time.”

Minkowski narrows her eyes. “And how many games have you played?”

Eiffel winces even harder. “Less than a hundred?”

“And more than?” Minkowski changes her mind halfway through his change of expression. “Never mind. I don’t actually want to know.”

“Hey, you should ref!” Eiffel looks like a drowning man who, clutching at straws, has suddenly found himself in possession of a jetpack. “Give that shoulder some time to rest, evaluate crew morale, take a few potshots at me for being stupid enough to play a computer game with a near-omniscient artificial intelligence. I mean, that has to be a pretty ideal night for you.”

Minkowski thinks about it for a minute. “Throw in a free round against me and you’ve got a deal.”

“Sold,” Eiffel says without hesitation. “Wait. Don’t tell me. You’re secretly the World Pong Champion of 1973.”

“I hadn’t even been born in 1973, Eiffel.” Minkowski says. “1987.”

He narrows his eyes. “You’re bluffing.”

“You’ll just have to find out, won’t you?” she says, and when Eiffel grins, she knows she has him exactly where she wants him.

“Bring it,” he says. To be fair he has her where he wants her as well, off the hunt and on the mend for the next few hours at least. All Minkowski gets is to retain just a little more dignity than she might otherwise.

Being in command gets lonely, though, in the same way that any position of authority confers a certain factual distance. Even with whatever strange newfound camaraderie they’ve all gained by way of surviving a covert operation by their own superiors, they fall back into old patterns without an incipit crisis to disrupt them.

It weighs on Minkowski more heavily when she actually has time to think about it, too, and isn’t just trying to put out one fire after another. She’s used to distance — any lifer on furlough knows what it feels like, after the creature comforts lose their shine and the first few hangovers wear off, to suddenly feel like a tourist in a foreign country — but it accumulates. It does something to her, always feeling as if she’s looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, as if she’s forgotten how to walk and talk like everybody else. Dignity be damned, sometimes it’s nice to pretend that she’s just another member of the crew, doing her job with one eye on the clock.

She isn’t, of course. Minkowski doesn’t get to forget that. Everybody on the ship depends on her, and that isn’t the kind of responsibility that ever stops weighing on her mind, or that ever should.

Just once, though, it’s nice to shoot the shit. To shove Eiffel aside and make room at the console to rub shoulders with somebody whose inner hypercompetitive five-year-old prioritizes Pong victories above all else, including self-preservation and the chain of command, and to push everything else to the back of her mind for the duration of one game (fiercely contested all around) and then two more to make it fair, and then Eiffel gets in a snit and demands a rematch with Hera, which is no less decisive but at least goes by more quickly, and Minkowski doesn’t remember when she last had so much fun.

“Hey,” Eiffel says, after his thirty-fourth consecutive loss. “Try not to make me do that again anytime soon, okay?”

Minkowski snorts. “Hey, this one is out of my hands.” She nods at the score. “Your track record speaks for itself.”

“No, I mean—” Eiffel shrugs on one side. “The shoulder thing. Look, all I’m saying is maybe take it easy for a few days? With all due respect, even you can’t put a rush order on tissue regeneration. And I’m speaking from experience here.”

“I won’t do anything stupid,” Minkowski says.

Eiffel doesn’t look happy, but he nods. “Okay,” he says. “I guess that’s about as much as I should hope for.”

Minkowski gives him a look that hopefully conveys the sentiment: _Yes, and you’re already pushing it_.

It’s a lot to fit into a single expression, but judging by his reaction Eiffel gets the gist. “Okay!” He turns back to the console. “Next round, all artificial consciousnesses have to compete while reciting irregular primes in sequence. Out loud. In Esperanto.”

“Tridek sep,” Hera says, voice as dry as dust. One of these days, Minkowski will figure out who taught her autopilot about deadpan. She has a feeling she won’t like the answer. “Kvindek naŭ.”

“Wait,” Eiffel says. “I don’t _speak_ Esperanto! For all I know you could be making these up.” The console beeps despondently. “Not fair! I wasn’t paying attention!”

“Imagine if you had to think about more than one thing at a time,” Hera says.

Eiffel glowers in Minkowski’s direction. “A little backup would be nice here.”

“Oh, no way.” She folds her arms. “This one is all you.”

It’s nice. Just once.

 

* * *

 

It isn’t the eight light years that Minkowski really feels when she misses Earth most, but the six hundred-odd days. Who is she kidding: six hundred and forty-six. Minkowski is nothing if not meticulous to a fault, detail-oriented and just as focused on the minutiae of a given objective as the long-term goals. She used to write that in cover letter after cover letter. In space, it translates into micromanagement and neurosis, sometimes useful and sometimes not. With distance, it translates into the sort of obsessive longing that eventually transmutes into a defensive kind of indifference. When she sends outgoing transmissions home, she signs off with an _I love you_ the same way people make a wish when they blow out candles on a birthday cake: because it can’t hurt. Just in case somebody happens to be listening.

Minkowski can’t miss her husband, because if she does she won’t think about anything else. Because she can compartmentalize, that in turn frees up more of her time and energy for micromanagement. As vicious cycles go, at least it tends towards productivity rather than paralysis.

When Lovelace returns — in suitably dramatic fashion, because it isn’t already difficult enough to keep Eiffel from turning his life into a one-man open mic — Minkowski finds herself in the strange position of simultaneously having too much and too little to do. Lovelace wants them to perform miracles on a daily basis, which is comforting because it’s impossible and, for once, she and Eiffel find themselves united against a common overlord.

On the other hand, Minkowski hasn’t answered to a direct superior in years. She finds herself surprised at how easily it comes back, the protocol and phrasing and the way she learns to read Lovelace in a hurry. She hasn’t lost the knack of making room for somebody to implement their goals and plans and preferences, and stepping in to help when and where she can. Once a career soldier, always a terrier.

If anything, answering to Lovelace’s authority is less surreal than trying to come up with a way to subvert it. Minkowski has had incompetent commanding officers and superiors that she hated, but when she was stationed planetside she always knew the worst that could happen would be a survivable fuckup of colossal proportions. In deep space, the worst that can happen is complete radio silence, forever: a brief burst of flame, perhaps, and a vast rush of wind, and then nothing. Nobody would ever know what happened to them. Nobody would ever find out. Minkowski couldn’t live with herself if her careerist loyalty and reflexive deference got any of them hurt in Lovelace’s single-minded quest for revenge. She draws the line at passing the buck up the chain of command when it’s their lives at stake rather than her career.

As such, it comes as no surprise that she almost becomes the first casualty of Lovelace’s command. Of course Eiffel accidentally electrifies the docking corridor — despite his denials, Minkowski feels comfortable assuming that he played at least some part in her brief stint as a conduit for several thousand volts — and of course she has to spend a bracing thirty minutes listening to bad joke after worse one. If Eiffel calls Lovelace “Actual” one more time, there’s a decent chance that Minkowski will depressurize the corridor herself, just so that she doesn’t have to listen to another minute of off-the-wall banter as her body heat slowly leaches through the uninsulated passageway and her breath begins to cloud the air.

Instead she fumes, as efficiently as she can, and curls up to conserve warmth and energy. Her right arm is still half-numb all the way up to her shoulder, and Minkowski knows what comes next: bone-deep fatigue cramps from the overworked muscle, and then a few days of decreased dexterity, all overshadowed by the profound irritation she experiences whenever some stupid bodily weakness leaves her sidelined.

“We’re going to be okay,” Lovelace says afterwards. “I promise.” As if it’s her promise to make, her crew who need to be reassured; as if she isn’t the biggest liability out of all of them, worse than Hilbert with her deadman’s switch and omnidirectional paranoia; as if she has it all under control, which she does. Minkowski might be half-frozen and half-fried, but she’s pretty sure most of her annoyance stems from the fact that Lovelace is still their best bet to get off the Hephaestus before some new nightmare crops up.

“Yes,” Minkowski says, and lets out a deep breath. She doesn’t say another word as soon as they get back on the Hephaestus proper until the door to her quarters is closed behind her and she can face the wall, hands balled into fists at her sides, and snap: “Fuck.”

She opens and closes her hand. It could be worse. For the most part, the cramps are fading, replaced by persistent pins and needles. Her grip could be better, but as long as she doesn’t have to hang onto any part of the station for dear life in the next week, Minkowski should be fine. _Of course, now I probably will,_ she thinks, and distracts herself from the prospect by trying to change flight suits with her nondominant hand without spinning face-first into the wall. It proves complicated enough that she almost misses the knock on the door. “Yes?” Minkowski says, one hand full of fresh flight suit and the other full of phantom acupuncture needles, and almost wheels around as the door opens.

“Oh,” Eiffel says, and blinks hard for a moment. “Sorry, I thought you meant — I mean — sorry.” He turns away but keeps talking. “I just thought I’d check up and see, you know, if you’re okay. Not a good time, I’m guessing.”

“Eiffel,” Minkowski snaps, flight suit drifting slowly in front of her chest. “Are you coming in or are you shouting though the door? Because the one thing you _aren’t_ doing is leaving it open while we have this conversation.”

“Right.” He pulls himself through the doorway and closes the hatch. “So, uh.”

Regulation underwear is really, really nothing to write home about. Minkowski knows because she made a point of mentioning it in her first few outgoing transmissions, just in case they were actually being picked up. It seemed like the sort of detail to mention about a new job far from home, something to show that she hadn’t forgotten, that she still thought about him. No reply, of course. That doesn’t seem to be how Goddard does things. More to the point: over the course of a long career, Minkowski has gotten acquainted with more unflattering sports bras than she cares to remember. Goddard’s uniforms still manage to give all the others a run for their money by being simultaneously effective and completely unsuitable for the extended mission duration. Eifffel still stares at the ceiling with an expression on his face like he doesn’t trust himself to look anywhere else.

“If I’m okay,” Minkowski prompts, because they could have this conversation from opposite sides of a closed door with considerably less awkwardness.

“Right,” Eiffel says. A faint flush is creeping into his cheeks. “After, you know, getting left in the combination walk-in freezer and bug zapper for half an hour. Sorry about that, by the way.”

Minkowski grits her teeth. “It’s fine. Seriously? This is what you couldn’t say from the other side of the door?”

“You said come in or go away!” His averted gaze is slipping, now, ticking over towards her a few degrees before he looks back at the ceiling. “And I thought it would be more rude to just go away, which in retrospect was a poor judgment on my part, so can we. Uh.”

Minkowski waits, counting down from ten in her head.

At seven, he meets her eyes.

“Right,” she says. “So. You were saying?”

“I was definitely not saying anything or about to say anything or thinking anything or about to think anything,” Eiffel says. “Sir. Commander, I mean. I just — I’m glad you’re okay.”

Minkowski crosses her arms. “Me too.”

“And, I, uh,” Eiffel starts, and trails off, incapacitated by commas and false starts. He takes a deep breath and Minkowski knows that he’ll start babbling again, given half a chance, and she also knows — quite suddenly — what he really wants, or what he thinks he wants but in fact needs, and she uncrosses her arms.

“Make it up to me,” she says.

It takes Eiffel a minute to catch up. His eyes widen, and Minkowski would laugh if she didn’t know that it would throw him off even more. “Wait,” he says. Minkowski watches him realize what she means and then, after that, the way he just goes blank. “But you’re — I mean.” He stares. “What?”

Minkowski kicks the crumpled flight suit away. “You heard me.” She keeps her voice very level. “Or don’t. Either way, don’t just stand there.”

She knows what Eiffel needs. As his commanding officer, she knows how to push so that he gets it.

“Look,” he says, “Commander—” and that does it, for some reason, the way he sounds like he would try to walk away from this if she asked.

“Shut up,” Minkowski says. Her voice comes rough and low, as if she’s angry. She might be. She can’t tell anymore. “What are you waiting for? Permission?”

“Uh,” Eiffel says, voice small. He drifts, but towards her, so that’s something. “Yes?”

“God damn it.” Minkowski closes her eyes, exhales, opens them again to find him nearer still. “Put up or shut up, Eiffel, don’t make me ask again.”

The room tumbles around her as he grabs her by the hips and buries his face between her legs as if he’s trying to drown himself, and for a moment Minkowski doesn’t know where to look or put her hands or what to say. Eiffel just presses his face into her for the space of a long breath, and then another, and then he tugs the fabric between her legs aside and honest-to-God nuzzles at her, as if he’s trying to get himself covered with her wetness.

There’s a lot, which would be more embarrassing if he wasn’t so clearly into it. Minkowski doesn’t spend a lot of time on herself, her own needs and wants, not with all the work and worrying she has to do. So it’s been a while, and she doesn’t take as much warming up as she might usually, but that doesn’t mean she gets there any faster. It just means that she wants to get the first time over with as soon as possible, so that she needs to come a little less urgently and can enjoy herself a little more.

Between her thighs, Eiffel makes a profoundly shameless sound. Minkowski covers her eyes, briefly, and then thinks: _Fuck it_. She likes what he’s doing — which is undirected and sloppy and very, very enthusiastic — just fine, but he can wait to get thoroughly acquainted with her cunt until she’s taken the edge off a little. She grabs at the first handhold that swings past, still clumsy on her right side, and because Eiffel can be surprisingly single-minded when he wants, he doesn’t drift away even when his shoulders hit the metal. If anything, his focus narrows.

“Oh, really,” Minkowski says. She gets one leg looped through the storage netting. “Why am I surprised.”

“Because you’re surprisingly narrow-minded for—” Eiffel begins, weakly, and Minkowski glares down at him.

“Think very carefully about how you want to finish that sentence,” she says.

“Nope!” Eiffel says. “I don’t, really, we can just go back to—”

“ _Good,_ ” Minkowski says, not waiting for him to finish, and grinds down against his face. She has more leverage that way, and it’s so much better. Eiffel shuts up, for a start, and just lets her ride his mouth. Judging by the noises he makes, he doesn’t have any particular objections either.

The first time Minkowski comes, it’s quick and hard and good, but not quite enough. “Don’t stop,” she bites out, and presses her forehead to the wall. For the better part of a minute, it’s too much too soon. Before long, though, it tips back over into pleasure, a slow steady build until Minkowski comes again with Eiffel’s fingers digging into her hips and his ragged breath hot on her thighs. The sound that he makes, mouth pressed to the cusp of her inner thigh, is choked-off and quiet, and then he just breathes for a moment.

He makes the lead-up to the third time slow and lazy, and Minkowski is in no rush. She lets Eiffel lap at her, messy and more than a little haphazard, but the point isn’t to get her off. He seems to be enjoying himself, and Minkowski isn’t complaining. She lets him take his time and doesn’t get bossy about it until the very end, when she snaps at him to _come on_ _already,_ and he laughs and does.

Afterwards, while she catches her breath, Minkowski turns to Eiffel. “God,” she says. “Remind me not to make that a habit.”

“You know what they say about promises made to be broken,” Eiffel says, and looks stricken. “I mean, not that — I don’t mean—“

“Yeah, you did.” Minkowski knows she should feel worse. She doesn’t, for some reason. That probably doesn’t say anything very flattering about her. It doesn’t feel like a betrayal of herself, just of the better woman she might have once been. Six hundred days is a long time, and Minkowski left that better self back on Earth if she ever existed to begin with. “Wait, what about—” She makes an abortive gesture towards the zip of his flight suit, and Eiffel flushes.

“Oh,” he says. “No, I’m fine, I—” He laughs a little awkwardly and puts his hands over his face, and Minkowski notices the stain seeping through his flight suit for the first time. “—Yeah. You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?”

Minkowski pretends to think. “No,” she says, trying and failing to suppress a grin. “You really weren’t kidding, were you?”

“Uh, no?” Eiffel seems to have taken refuge in sarcasm. “I mean, I said top five, I might have meant top three! Maybe top two. Oh my God, can we stop talking about this?”

She holds her hands up. “Sure,” she says. “As long as you change that suit.”

“Oh, yeah, this is great. Very comfortable,” Eiffel says. “No, _obviously_ I’m going to change it! Jeez.” He looks at her for a moment. “We’re okay, right? I mean, you’re the commanding officer, plus everything else, and I kind of—” He trails off.

Minkowski can fill in the blanks. He needs her to be objective. He needs her to be a good commander. He needs her to be rock-solid.

“We’re okay,” she says. She doesn’t promise. Eiffel knows that he can count on her word, and needs the reminder.

He nods. “Okay. Good.”

“Oh, go change,” Minkowski says. “Get the ten minutes of awkwardness over with. We still have a lot to do before we can think about whatever comes next.”

She gives him a significant look. He knows the drill: communications room at 2100 hours, if he can clean it of bugs. They can’t live with an indefinitely ticking time bomb, metaphorical or literal. At the very least, they have to come up with a contingency plan. Business as usual.

Eiffel nods, back on familiar ground. He seems a little more present, a little more certain of himself. Good: that’s what Minkowski needs from him.

“Sir, yes sir,” he says, and goes.

Left alone, Minkowski looks at nothing in particular for a moment, and is surprised to realize that yes, she is okay; yes, they’re good. Everything hasn’t fallen apart. She doesn’t feel like something has been irrevocably ruined or lost forever, and she doesn’t feel like anybody but herself: Lieutenant Commander Renée Minkowski, responsible for her ship and all souls aboard, no matter what or who else might interfere.

She pulls herself together and gets back to work.

 

* * *

 

Hera doesn’t bring it up, which is how Minkowski knows that she was paying attention.

“So,” she says, the next day, on her way to rewire the station’s sensory scanners just enough to fake a convincing emergency. “Eiffel.”

“Yes, Commander Minkowski,” Hera says, which is how Minkowski knows that the conversation is going to be horrifically awkward on top of that.

“You talk to him,” she says, and realizes immediately how that sounds. “I mean, you talk to him about things that have nothing to do with mission parameters. And he listens. Right?”

Hera stays quiet for a moment. “Commander,” she says finally, “if there’s something you want to talk to Eiffel about, I don’t think I’m the one to ask.”

“No, no.” Minkowski tries again. “I mean, you find him interesting. His loss would be an unacceptable mission outcome for you, wouldn’t it.”

“His loss is inevitable,” Hera says. The last syllable echoes faintly, but when she speaks again her voice is steady. “The loss of any crew member would significantly compromise mission effectiveness under current circumstances.”

Minkowski nods. “All right.”

She swings around the corner, into the corridor that leads to engineering. After a moment, Hera breaks the silence. “Yes, the loss of Officer Eiffel would reduce my interest in most aspects of the mission not directly related to its primary goals.”

“Right.” Minkowski takes a moment to consider that from all angles, just to make sure she isn’t missing anything. “You have a vested interest in his continued wellbeing.”

“That isn’t the worst way to put it.”

Minkowski nods. “And I take care of my crew.”

“As commanding officer of the station,” Hera begins.

“No,” Minkowski interrupts. “Well, yes, as commanding officer. But—” She thinks for a moment. “Well, I don’t mean to be condescending. I just don’t know else to put it.” She takes a breath and lets it tumble out. “You care about Eiffel. As much as I do. Right?”

“Is that what you wanted to know? Yes,” Hera says. “I mean, it isn’t that simple, but you don’t have words for it. So yes, Commander. As long as we agree that neither of us means the same thing, and that neither of us can articulate to the other what we actually mean, and that somehow none of that matters in this context, yes. I do. Why do you ask?”

“Right,” Minkowski says. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard Hera try so hard to explain something that highlights so clearly their intrinsic differences. Eiffel has a way of bringing that out in people, not that Hera — Minkowski wrenches her thoughts back into order. There doesn’t seem to be any point trying to partition the universal effect that Eiffel apparently has on artificial and organic consciousnesses alike. He just has a way. “I don’t know. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t misjudged it, I guess. And I wanted to — I don’t know.”

“If you’re talking about what happened yesterday, I can’t exactly avert my awareness,” Hera says. Her voice hangs only slightly: _what happened._ “Just because I’m the autopilot doesn’t mean I have opinions on everything that happens on the station. You’re in command. What you choose to do with that authority is your own business.”

That sounds like the kind of thing that somebody would say if they had a very strong opinion and weren’t interested in sharing, but Minkowski keeps that thought to herself. “I know,” she says instead, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear whether you think it’s a good idea or not.”

By the time Hera answers, Minkowski is nearly at the back of the engineering section. “I think you know what your crew needs,” she says. “And I think you were right.”

Minkowski nods. “Thank you,” she says.

“Permission to speak freely?” Hera asks.

“Granted.”

“Thank you.” Hera’s voice crackles. “I know that you care about Officer Eiffel, and I know that you would never do anything to compromise the mission. Not the one you were briefed on in Canaveral, but what you think of as the mission. Do your job. Pay your dues. Get home safely. But I want you to know that you aren’t the only one with—” Her voice echoes again. “—a _vested interest,_ as you so considerately put it, in what Eiffel needs. You just happen to be the best-positioned to provide it, sometimes.”

Minkowski waits for a moment. “Fair,” she says, when the echoes of Hera’s words die away. “I deserved that.”

“Yes,” Hera agrees. “But I do mean it. All of it. I think you do know how to take care of your crew.”

“But I need to stay focused on why that matters,” Minkowski says. “To get them home.”

“Yes,” Hera says. Her voice is low and steady and clear. “Whatever it takes.”

“He doesn’t talk to me, you know,” Minkowski says on impulse. “He talks to you. And listens. So I don’t think it’s just me. I think you know as well.”

After a moment, Hera says: “Yes.”

Minkowski nods, slowly. “All right,” she says. On the far wall, she can see a large circuit box, full of wiring that she needs to strategically misconfigure. “That’s all. From me, anyway. You?”

“No, Commander,” Hera says. “I think that was it.”

“Good,” Minkowski says. “Because if there is, we need to get it out of the way before we go full War Games on these sensors.”

“Yes. I see,” Hera says, in the tone of voice that means she doesn’t see at all.

“Oh, for—” Minkowski catches herself. “He’s contagious. Like fungus. Or the flu. It’s a movie. Not a very good one.”

“He does tend to leave an impression,” Hera says, and Minkowski knows that they’re all right, too. Not that there’s any reason they wouldn’t be, but it’s good to know for sure; Minkowski has enough to worry about without adding poor communication to the list. “I thought it was just me.”

“Oh no,” Minkowski says. “I wish. Did you know he has the entire script of _The Matrix_ memorized? But not just the first one. All of them. Even the animated one. I didn’t even _know_ there was an animated sequel.”

“He tried to explain that to me,” Hera says. “It went — poorly. Actually, he made a different reference that reminded me of Captain Lovelace.”

Minkowski snorts. “Was it about Sigourney Weaver?”

“No,” Hera says. “I think it was a different genre. Fantasy? But—” She puts on a voice that Minkowski assumes is meant to be Eiffel. “No, Hera, it’s _complicated._ ”

“Sounds like him.” Minkowski reorients herself to push off a handrail. “How are you holding up, what with the whole imminent explosion thing? I mean, not that any of this is particularly easy on anyone, but I’d imagine it’s especially hard on you.”

“That would be an understatement,” Hera says. “Actually, that was why I brought up that reference Eiffel made. He said it was from a movie?”

Later — after she tells Eiffel what happened, and rides out his inevitable panicked outburst, and after they decide that they need all the help they can get — she passes by the communications room on her way to the observation deck.

“Wait,” Hera says, muffled through the wall. “So neither of them are left-handed?”

Eiffel laughs. “See, that’s where it gets awesome,” he says. “Actually they’re both ambidextrous, but they’re pretending to be left-handed so that it’s more fun. And also to be polite. But mostly? It’s because it’s really, really cool.”

“Okay,” Hera says slowly. “Explain what this has to do with the catchphrase.”

“As you wish,” Eiffel says. Minkowski can hear the laugh in his voice. She rolls her eyes. “So _actually_ this one guy has a tragic backstory, because you have to have a tragic backstory before you get to have a cool catchphrase, and it turns out—”

Their voices fade behind Minkowski as she goes on her way. She knows they’ll still be talking when she gets back. If Eiffel can keep talking despite the omnipresent threat of an imminent explosion, the ongoing risk that Command will figure out what they’re up to, and an experimental mutant retrovirus slumbering in his circulatory system, she can’t imagine what it would take to shut him up.

Minkowski hopes that she never finds out.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t like to think about the time when Eiffel is gone. While he’s gone, she doesn’t think much at all; after he comes back, she tries not to think about any of it.

While he’s gone, everybody and everything falls apart. The simple truth of it is that Minkowski doesn’t know how to function without somebody else’s wellbeing to prioritize above her own. She does her job, but what good is a commander without a crew, on a ship consumed by rot and paranoia? What good is she if she can’t keep the rest of them in line, if she can’t find some way to hold it all together and keep anybody else from getting hurt?

So she crumbles too, slowly and only when she’s sure nobody will notice. On double rotations, trying to assess the extent of the structural damage, or when nobody else is on the bridge and she can stare into the too-near distance without attracting comment, but worst of all when she has nothing to do. The sole advantage of the crisis is that its magnitude has obliterated all smaller differences, everything that might otherwise result in mutiny or — given the company — murder, but that means that the Hephaestus is no longer perpetually short-staffed, and that in turn means that Minkowski has more time to herself than she would like.

She talks to Hera, because if anybody understands it’s the autopilot. If Eiffel was there, she knows what he would say — some joke about how only a supercomputer’s supercomputer could understand how Minkowski thinks — but neither of them are talking about it, so Minkowski keeps the thought to herself. She tells Hera about musicals until she runs out of Sondheim, and then they move on to Earth literature within Minkowski’s lifetime with a focus on theater, and if every so often they stumble around the edges of Eiffel’s absence neither of them mention that either.

Hera misses him. Minkowski knows that. It shows in the silence, the way that she has nobody else to talk to, the way nobody else starts a conversation with her about whatever inane subject of the day just to hear it broken down to its logical components and reassembled for fun. She does her best, but Minkowski is nowhere near as gregarious, nowhere near as good at talking just for its own sake.

Between them, though, she and Hera manage. To skirt the fact of his loss, and the way that neither of them quite know how to continue without him, eccentric orbits spiraling further and further out of control; to keep the true extent of the damage — personal and practical — hidden from Hilbert and Lovelace until it’s too far gone for anything other than total structural collapse.

He doesn’t make them better. Minkowski knows people who make her better, has let them down over and over, and it feels completely different. It feels somehow less bad to know that she simply isn’t as good a person as others have thought, that their trust or loyalty or love has been misplaced. That feels natural, an effect of poor judgment on one hand and simple fallibility on the other. What Eiffel does is more difficult to describe, and therefore all the more impossible to compensate for when he’s gone; he reminds all of them that even if they’re living in a pressure cooker eight light years from Earth, orbiting a unique stellar anomaly, they all would go to ridiculous lengths for toothpaste. He brings out something indefinably and yet unmistakably human, or whatever it is: something else in all of them, anyway, that makes the endless rotations, the perpetual red daylight and monotony of orbital life, bearable.

Minkowski thinks that, if she could ask him, Eiffel might not blame her at all. He would just shrug and say: _Eh, that’s how it goes, right? Had to happen eventually. No one lives forever._

That makes it worse, somehow. Letting him down, failing to keep him safe, means that Minkowski doesn’t know what her purpose is anymore. She might not have one, because if she can’t take care of her crew, then what good is she? Who is she? Commanding officer of nobody and nowhere, all ambition and no ability, the inverse of what Hilbert thought would be the worst possible insult; willing to sign everything else away for one impossible chance at everything she’d ever dreamed of, and then — when it really counted — just not up to the job.

She still has a crew, is the worst part, even if one member is bureaucratically dead and the presence of another raises serious astrophysical questions. Minkowski doesn’t count Hera for the same reason that she doesn’t count herself; they are both fixtures of the station, so enmeshed in its systems that they think and work in time with now its single nuclear pulse. If the Hephaestus goes down, they both go with it.

Lovelace disregards authority to the point of actively inhibiting it, though, and Hilbert is difficult at the best of times, so focused on his singular goals — even his own survival only takes any kind of priority because it just happens to be necessary for him to continue his research — that any kind of secondary goal has to be transposed onto them to merit any sort of attention.

Minkowski is a commanding officer with no command, then, just drifting. She thinks of it as a matter of waiting for the next impact to hit, and the next after that, and at some point she won’t be able to take it any longer and she’ll shatter. And then, maybe, it won’t be her fault, her failure, her burden to bear any longer. Then she might be able to rest knowing that she did everything she could for as long as she could, to the best of her ability, and finally ran up against odds that even she couldn’t bulldoze through or stare down. Then she might be able to give all of it up and see what being nobody is actually like, just one more piece of space flotsam on a decaying orbit, purposeless and out of battery.

“Commander?” Hera says. It should be her saying that. She should be the one asking if Hera is there.

“I’m here,” Minkowski says.

They limp onwards.

 

* * *

 

Eiffel is gone, swallowed by the endless darkness all around them, and then he isn’t; then he’s back, far too thin for comfort and so insubstantial that Minkowski thinks he might just fade away, but alive. He’s alive and real and warm, when she hugs him. He doesn’t slip through her fingers.

They have problems, obviously. Their new problems actually manage to make the old ones look insignificant by comparison, which is no small feat given the mutiny and actual and attempted murder involved. Before they have to deal with any of that, though, Kepler and his crew have to take stock of the Hephaestus. They have to prod their printless fingertips into every nook and cranny and make sure that nothing is unaccounted for, until they know the station as well as if it was their own. By then, it will be.

For once, Minkowski doesn’t care about any of that. There isn’t anything she can do until she knows what Kepler and Jacobi and, in particular, Maxwell are capable of, and she would prefer not to spend the intervening time walking on eggshells. Instead she takes stock. Lovelace is the element that she would have expected to throw any Goddard employee off the most, given that she shouldn’t be alive — let alone onboard — to begin with. Kepler seems completely unfazed by her presence. Hilbert seems no more popular with Kepler than he is with Minkowski, although she has to give him grudging credit for not murdering them when it would have been easiest. As far as anybody at Goddard knows, she isn’t a liability at all. Like Hilbert said, she’s a career officer with more skill than ambition, content to pass orders from her superiors to her subordinates.

Kepler doesn’t look at her as if he expects unquestioning loyalty, though. He looks at her as if he expects obedience and could not care less whether it’s motivated by habit or fear. Minkowski can respect that, in its own fucked-up entitled way. He never tries to seem like anything other than a threat. After so long second-guessing everyone and everything, that seems like a relief in and of itself.

Another point in Kepler’s dubious favor is that he doesn’t ask anything of Minkowski or her crew for two days while the Urania integrates its infrastructure with the Hephaestus. He restocks their station with basic supplies — Minkowski stares at the crate of toothpaste for a long, long time — and lets them know that after the artificial weekend, they’ll all be back on rotation, and then he makes himself scarce on the Urania doing whatever a human puzzle box does in its spare time. Reading, maybe. Coming up with metaphors. Chessboxing in his head. Minkowski doesn’t know and she doesn’t care, because she has her crew back, and getting into Kepler’s head is a thought experiment for another time.

She spends about three hours in the hold organizing supplies, because it helps calm her nerves, and Minkowski knows that she should sleep after that. Instead, she goes back to the bridge and looks out at the star. Somehow its blue light is even more sinister than the red used to be, on the wrong end of the spectrum for the roiling solar storms and flares that still mar its surface. In the corner, Eiffel — asleep — stirs. For once, his ankle is tethered to the nearest handhold, and his position is relatively compact compared to his usual omnidirectional sprawl.

Minkowski wonders what it was like, to drift for so long with no way to orient himself except for the rapidly fading light of the star and the certainty that whichever direction he picks is likely to be the wrong one. She remembers being a very small child at the beach, and being bowled over by a wave and not knowing for a moment which way was up, except by the bubbles rising from her mouth. And after that when she had broken gasping through the surface, water streaming from her nose and mouth, she had scrambled back to dry land. He makes a soft noise — a very faint whimper — and Minkowski wants to crack open her chest and give him everything within, her blood, her breath; anything to go back and try again. Anything to go back and do better, make it so that Eiffel never had to go through any of it, never had to be braver than she thinks she’ll ever understand. She thinks that she would do anything to keep him from sounding and looking like that, tired and small and hurt.

“Commander?” His voice is sleep-rough and quiet, and Minkowski tries to smile. She feels like her face is going to crumble if she tries, though, and only manages halfway.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says, as Eiffel unwinds the tether. “Thought I’d make sure you weren’t still working.”

He laughs. “Nope. It just seemed easier than finding my quarters. If they’re still here. They didn’t fall into the star, right?”

Minkowski snorts. “No,” she says. “Your Entertainment Weekly is safe. And all the cigarettes that didn’t go up in a blaze of glory last Christmas.”

“Yeah,” Eiffel says. “Last Christmas.”

Minkowski feels a decade older. She can only imagine how long it seems for Eiffel. “Yeah,” she says, and then: “Come here.”

He wraps his arms around her and lets her hold him close. After a minute, he says, head tucked under her chin: “It wasn’t your fault.”

Minkowski shakes her head. She knows he can feel it. “It was,” she says. “I shouldn’t have left you. I should have thought of something.”

He just curls up tighter. “You didn’t,” he says, and seems to catch himself. “Look. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here now. Seriously.”

“You aren’t making sense,” Minkowski says, but she can feel his heart beating through his too-prominent ribs. For the first time in far too long, she feels as if she can breathe a little more freely, as if some of the weight has been lifted from her shoulders.

After a while, Eiffel’s breathing evens out and his grip loosens. Minkowski doesn’t let him drift away. She hangs there, looking out at the star and keeping time by his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his chest.

“Lieutenant,” Kepler says, and Minkowski whips her head around to glare at him.

“Shh,” she hisses, and he raises his hands. Behind him, Jacobi closes the hatch. Minkowski gives him her best flat bureaucratic sneer, the sort that promises triplicate paperwork if he says anything. “What?”

“I wanted to ask about repairs rotations,” Kepler says. He keeps his voice down. “How you typically allot resources and crew members, and if you had any guidelines I might want to take into account. For example, if any parts of your station regularly explode or otherwise become hostile to human life.”

“They don’t—” Minkowski says, and has to reconsider. “Engineering is usually pretty safe, but the fore deck gets a little dicey during solar events. And the hydraulics are — unpredictable.” She clears her throat. Eiffel stirs, and she holds her breath until his breathing steadies again. “Not fatally unpredictable, but worth keeping a fire extinguisher around if you’re doing anything extensive.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Kepler says. “What about life support?”

“Nominal.” Minkowski frowns. “Actually, we prioritized that system. For fairly obvious reasons. It should hold up longer than anything else, even with the structural damage.”

“Good to hear.” Kepler tilts his head to the side. “Fuel intake?”

Minkowski winces. “On the more explosive side,” she admits. “I try not to make any adjustments unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Kepler nods. “Thank you,” he says. “That’s very helpful.” He turns to leave.

“What?” Minkowski says, a little louder than she intends. “That’s it?”

Kepler turns back around and looks first at her, then at Eiffel. He blinks. “You haven’t questioned how I manage my crew, Lieutenant,” he says. “I thought I should extend the same courtesy to you.”

Behind him, Jacobi smirks. Even before he opens his mouth, Minkowski knows that she’ll want to hit him for whatever he says, which is: “Looks like you could use some pointers, speaking of.”

“Mr. Jacobi, we are guests on the Hephaestus and we will respect that,” Kepler says evenly. His voice doesn’t rise at all. Jacobi just smirks even more.

“Yes, _sir,_ ” he says.

“Close that on your way out,” Minkowski mutters, because she isn’t above petty revenge when the opportunity presents itself.

Curled against her side, Eiffel stirs again. “Commander?”

“It’s nothing,” she says, alone again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Mm,” he says. “Okay.”

Minkowski has so much to do. She has a station to repair. She has a crew to take care of, new superiors to doubt, and new orders to question. She doesn’t have time to waste on anything that doesn’t present some kind of benefit, immediate or otherwise. It almost comes as a relief: Minkowski doesn’t think she’ll have much time for herself until this is all over, one way or another.

For him, there and then, she has all the time in the world.


End file.
